Books in Brief: Nonfiction

By Arianne Chernock

Published: August 19, 2001

They Went Whistling

Women Wayfarers, Warriors,

Runaways, and Renegades.

By Barbara Holland.

Pantheon, $23.

Cleopatra, George Sand, Mata Hari and Dorothy Day are just some of the women featured in Barbara Holland's ''They Went Whistling,'' a frank and often fascinating romp through 2,000 years of history. Grouping her subjects into categories like ''outlaws,'' ''exiles'' and ''seekers,'' she celebrates women who challenged convention by taking their lives into their own hands and having independent adventures. Holland's aims are modest -- she seeks to provide ''a brief look at a small handful of willful wildlings, with no attempt at psychosocial explanations or larger meanings.'' She regrets the extent to which careers impose new restrictions on talented women. ''Careers, it turns out, keep women in line more effectively than policemen or repressive husbands,'' Holland writes. ''Freedom, according to the song, is just another word for nothing left to lose, and now the best and brightest of the women finally have something to lose.'' Holland, whose previous books include ''Bingo Night at the Fire Hall,'' is right to challenge careerism, but wrong in seeing the professional path as a particular threat to women. She forgets that adventurers both male and female together face this modern predicament. Arianne Chernock